#424 : Del Yeah Rewards: Del Taco's Key Component for Business Growth ( Short Summary Show)

Paula: Welcome to Let’s Talk Loyalty, an Industry podcast for loyalty marketing professionals. I’m Paula Thomas, The Founder of Let’s Talk Loyalty. Today’s episode is hosted by Tom Peace, Managing Director of The Loyalty People, a strategic consultancy with a laser focus on loyalty, CRM and customer engagement.

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Tom: Hi, I’m Tom Peace, Managing Director of the Loyalty People and Presenter of Let’s Talk A Little Loyalty. Welcome to this week’s short summary show. In this week’s episode of Let’s Talk A Little Loyalty, I’ll be reviewing the original podcast hosted by Paula Thomas, where she’s joined by Erin Levzow previously Vice President of Marketing Technology at Del Taco in the US.

Erin shares her industry leading insights and ideas from the Del Yeah program, which has won prestigious awards including B2C App of the Year and the Gold Award for Loyalty Strategy. For those of us unaware, Del Taco is the world’s second largest Mexican fast food restaurant chain, and its loyalty program is playing a vital role in its popularity and growth.

The first thing I love about this program is the name Del Yeah is a super catchy and fun, it aligns perfectly with the brand. Erin talks us through how she approached this major development for Del Taco, which started with competitor research, looking at other brands in the hospitality space, such as Starbucks, who have such very strong engagement through their app in terms of customer ordering, convenience, gamification, and more.

It became quickly apparent that the hospitality and QSR brands need a really strong consumer interface to drive engagement. Erin also looked at other brands like Amazon to develop the customer interface. As Erin admits, she’s a creature of habit just like the rest of us, and we default to our easiest solution.

Convenience and ease of use, therefore become a major driver of retention and loyalty. Starbucks as well as others also provide really interesting ways to engage in other ways than just purchasing coffee, through gamification, for example, this also needed to be considered in the design of the app and loyalty program for Del Yeah.

This meant that Del Taco needed to re-platform their entire tech stack to build this new innovation, and the obvious investment here needed to be very carefully considered by the business. The investment paid off significantly because the program has won prestigious award, including the B2C app of the year, and also the Loyalty Strategy Gold Award in 2022, just nine months after launch the app as signed up over 675,000 members.

Erin talks through the major advantages of bringing the technology up to date and future focused. Not only does this create improved data access and insight capability, but also enable channel communication preferences and the ability to target offers based on what they knew about members. Erin also started to dabble in the metaverse with collaborations with Minecraft opening up amazing opportunities and ways to reach members and new customers, which wouldn’t have been available on the old technology stack.

This was a wonderful podcast to review since it was mostly focused on how the right technology can really turbo boost your loyalty program. Please do take the time to listen to the main show, which can be found at www.letstalkloyalty.com, and first aired on the 16th of June, 2022. Episode number 236.

Thanks for listening. I hope you enjoyed my summary show all the best, and speak to you soon, Tom.

Paula: This show is sponsored by The Wise Marketer, the world’s most popular source of loyalty marketing news, insights, and research. The Wise Marketer also offers loyalty marketing training through its loyalty academy, which has already certified, over 500 executives in 38 countries as certified loyalty marketing professionals.

For more information, check out thewisemarketer.com and loyaltyacademy.org.

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